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FIRE CENTRAL

YORBA LINDA - Triage-type decisions made while fire crews drove down smoke-filled streets in the hopes of saving as many homes as possible forced them to drive past burning homes and frustrated residents as winds threw embers up to a mile ahead of the Freeway Complex fire, a preliminary report on the blaze said.

“However, even with the best training and practice, it takes great discipline to trade off the life of one patient for another, just as it takes the same discipline to drive past a structure that is on fire to defend one that is not,” Orange County Fire Authority's preliminary report stated.

Those decisions were not easy, Fire Authority Chief Chip Prather said during Tuesday's Yorba Linda City Council meeting, but they had to be made as crews faced a fire without a discernable front, gusting winds hurling ember showers in every direction and no water in some Yorba Linda neighborhoods.

A total of 187 homes were destroyed. An additional 127 were damaged. Yorba Linda suffered the majority of the destruction, losing 118 homes as firefighters battled no or low water pressure in the Hidden Hills neighborhood.

“There was more fire than we had fire engines,” Prather said. “We did not have enough fire engines to match the demand. That's going to happen in a disaster like this.”

Released just seven days after the Freeway Complex fire was officially closed, the preliminary report is an unusual step, produced at the request of Yorba Linda Mayor Pro Tem and OCFA board member Jan Horton. Post-mortem reviews of major fires take six months to a year to produce, encompassing thousands of interviews, the review of thousands of pages of documents and the cobbling together of experiences and opinions of assisting agencies and experts to determine what went right and what went wrong and what can be done better next time. Horton asked for the final report to be done in 30 days.

Fire Authority officials said the report will be done by March 1. But the preliminary report gave residents and government officials a peek into the situation firefighters faced while battling the quick-moving fire that raced through four counties, chewing up acres per minute.

According to a preliminary investigation by CalFire, a car driving on the 91 freeway near the Green River exit just after 9 a.m. Nov. 15 accidentally sparked the fire, which strong winds pushed toward Yorba Linda.

An hour and 45 minutes after the fire started, a fire started near the Olinda Alpha Landfill in Brea. The two fires would eventually merge into a single 30,050-acre Freeway Complex blaze that would leave hundreds homeless and chase thousands more from their homes as they tried to escape the flames. Nearly 4,000 firefighters from 267 agencies were called in to help in the fight.

Damage from the fire is still being assessed, but preliminary estimates put the cost to fight the fire at $16.1 million - the vast majority which will be reimbursed by CalFire. And residents living in fire-scarred hillsides should bolster themselves for several seasons of potential mudslides and evacuations, fire officials said.

“This is not a one-year event,” said Michael Moore, the OCFA division chief who oversees Yorba Linda. “This is going to be a couple years that we're going to be prepared.

“Our goal is to keep everybody safe,” Moore said.

Fire officials credited pre-staging equipment and crews, recent tabletop exercises involving similar fire scenarios, and changes in the state's mutual aid system for a quick response. Within the first four hours of the fire, there were 159 engines, three trucks, five water tenders, eight helicopters and 10 air tankers attacking the flames. Forty-one engines were there within the first hour, the report said.

Crews fought to keep the blaze in Corona, Moore told the City Council, but single-digit humidity and winds gusting up to 40 mph quickly pushed the fire out of control. The fire scorched about 10,000 acres in the first 12 hours.

“It was a massive effort to keep it in the Corona area and not let it spot into Yorba Linda,” Moore said. “Once it spotted, we worked to try to keep the fire in check.”

While inadequate brush clearance was blamed for the majority of property loss in the 2007 Santiago fire, it was embers sucked into attics and eaves, not untamed brush, that caused homes to burn in the Freeway Complex blaze. State-of-the-art temperature regulation systems turned devastating, pulling in burning embers from the outside.

Fire officials said they plan to work with Yorba Linda to make sure homes are built to withstand ignition from falling embers or embers that fly into attics or eaves and other openings.

The California Building Standards Commission and the state fire marshal recently adopted “ignition-resistant building standards” for homes built in high fire hazard zones or locally designated wildland/urban interface areas. Those standards, which govern construction methods for roofs, eaves, vents, walls, doors, windows and patio covers and decks, went into effect in January, but the state has not sent Orange County the final maps for adoption. Those maps are not expected to arrive until early next year.

Yorba Linda adopted similar regulations in 1996, but none of the destroyed or damaged homes were built after 1996 and are not subject to the regulations, the OCFA's report said.

Coupled with insufficient ignition-resistant construction was the lack of water firefighters were faced with in some Yorba Linda neighborhoods in the midst of the firefight, according to the report.

Five to six Hidden Hills homes that burned to the ground could have been saved if firefighters had the water they needed, Prather said in a previous interview with the Register. And residents and city officials continue to demand answers for why the city's water district had insufficient water pressure and dry hydrants.

About 2 p.m. Nov. 15, fire crews facing advancing flames tapped into some fire hydrants to come up empty. Homes continued to burn as they were also forced to battle the low water pressure and dry hydrants on Hidden Hills Road, Mission Hills Lane, High Tree Circle, Fairwood Circle, Green Crest Drive, Skyridge Drive and several other streets, according to the report.

OCFA water tenders were called in to shuttle water to crews. But the water pressure problems also hindered the tenders' efforts, Prather said. Some of the depletion of water pressure was directly attributed to engines drawing thousands of gallons of water a minute from hydrants simultaneously, Prather said.

Water district officials were notified of the water-pressure problem immediately but were unable to figure out the reason for the pressure loss, the report said. It took more than three hours for water pressure to improve enough for water tenders to continue filling up, the report said.

One fire strike team leader told Prather that his crews could have saved five to six homes of the dozens of homes burned in the Hidden Hills neighborhood. But without water, the team's five engines were forced to move to lower ground. There, they found hydrants with water and made a stand against the blaze.

Water district officials have said their system met the minimum requirements of the OCFA and the state fire code.

"It was a problem of too much fire, not a problem of not enough water," said water district spokesman Laer Pearce.

Watching the water situation from its emergency operations center, it wasn't until 5:50 p.m. Nov. 15 that water district officials asked OCFA for three fire engines to pump water at Pepper and Manzanita to increase water pressure. The engines sat on the street pumping water between two of the district's water grids for nearly eight hours, forcing their fuel tanks to be refilled twice, Prather said.

In addition to asking for a timeline accounting of firefighting resources in her community during the first 12 hours of the fire, Yorba Linda's Horton has also requested water district's hydrant maintenance and inspection records.

The water district, not the Fire Authority, maintains and inspects the approximately 4,000 fire hydrants within its district. The Fire Authority, responsible for putting out fires in Yorba Linda and Placentia, operates in good faith that those hydrants will work when they are needed for firefighting, Prather said. But it has never been an issue - until now.

"It is something exceptionally important to our job," Prather said. "We can't have this situation again."

Prather has met with water district officials in the hopes of rooting out the water issues.

Fire officials also credited the actions of residents for their part in battling the flames and helping to save not only their own homes but the homes of neighbors and friends.

“There were heroic things done by the citizens in your community,” Prather said.

Building on that community spirit, Prather encouraged residents to sign up for the OCFA's reserve firefighter program or the Community Emergency Response Team, both valuable resources during large-scale emergencies. The Fire Authority, along with fire departments from six other Southern California counties, are exploring a program to educate residents to stay behind during a wildfire to help protect their properties.

Statistics show that most property damage is the result of lingering embers after the main fire front blows through, Prather said.

Leave Early or Stay and Defend, a program that has been used in Australia for the past 20 years, would arm residents who meet certain criteria both in their abilities and location with a checklist and instructions on how to protect their properties. OCFA officials are expected to meet with Yorba Linda representatives in January or February to discuss implementing the program, Prather said.

Yorba Linda may have sustained the majority of the destruction of the Freeway Complex fire, but there are many communities that could fall victim to a similar firestorm, Prather said.

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